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Network Neutrality -- Measures and Measurements: A Survey

Authors:
Clemens Cap
Andreas Dähn
Thomas Mundt

Keywords: Network neutrality; Network performance anomaly detection; User-oriented performance metrics; In- trusive and non-intrusive performance measurement mech- anisms.

Abstract:
Over the last five years, network neutrality (which means that network infrastructure is treating all data packets equally) has grown to a valuable research area which can be seen as application of anomaly detection. Neutrality violations result from a combination of traffic differentiation (either by statistical protocol identification or deep packet inspection) and infrastructure components which are capable of classification based packet handling. We examine some examples for neutrality violations and then go on to neutrality testing. Neutrality testing approaches can be divided into three categories: Active ap- proaches (which usually utilize specialized testing peers), passive approaches (which monitor the incoming and outgoing network traffic at the user’s computer or local network) and hybrid approaches (which combine both). In this article, we take a look at some implementations and at assets and drawbacks of both approaches and implementations. Some major drawbacks originate from ambiguous test results (such as a test reporting a neutrality violation for what really is a network congestion). Depending on the approach and the implementation, different testing programs have very different statements which shall not be compared without consideration of testing principle and implementation details. Aside from algorithmic testing, crowd- sourcing approaches which use volunteers’ observations have been developed recently.

Pages: 56 to 61

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: July 21, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-443X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-285-1

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from July 21, 2013 to July 26, 2013